Another eclectic selection of movies I’ve watched in the past few months, ranging from a politically nuanced spaghetti western to spectacular action, lush anime, a big-screen travelogue, various horrors from low to relatively high-budget, a charming coming-of-age comedy, a nightmare with uncanny life-sized puppets, and a rediscovered vérité comedy from the late-’60s.
One of the benefits of retirement is being able to go to weekday matinees, which means seeing movies in almost empty theatres – the best way as far as I’m concerned. So this year I’ve already seen more movies than all of last year or the year before . But that also means I’ve seen a few movies I probably wouldn’t have bothered with before. Among the duds, though, have been some good – or at least interesting – movies I’m glad I saw on a big screen.
After his radical influence on film comedy in the 1960s, with movies like A Hard Day’s Night (1964), The Knack … and How to Get It (1965) and How I Won the War (1967), Richard Lester remade himself as a skilful creator of mainstream entertainments in the 1970s, beginning with The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). The mix of history, politics and violence is in constant tension with irreverent comedy and slapstick, while the large cast epitomizes the ’70s attraction to big-name ensembles. Criterion’s new two-disk set – available in both 4K UHD and Blu-ray – has been mastered from a gorgeous restoration by StudioCanal, supported by more than three hours of extras which detail the unconventional production.
Two key films from the era of peak paranoia, the late-’60s and early ’70s, are given exemplary disk releases – Theordore J. Flicker’s darkly comic The President’s Analst (1967) on Blu-ray from Imprint and Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmarish The Conversation (1974) on 4K in a dual-format edition from StudioCanal.
My plunge into streaming has been more rewarding than not, catching up with a slew of recent action movies as well as a variety of older movies I missed decades ago, or remember from television screenings back in the ’70s.
Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024) is a delightfully witty comedy of intertwined cultures, a blend of Winnipeg and Tehran, sparking surprising moments of recognition which affirm a shared humanity. Formally inventive, its layered comedy gathers a deepening emotional resonance as its non-linear narrative gradually brings a disparate collection of characters together in a surprisingly moving final act. One of the finest films ever made in Winnipeg.
In this, the longest section of my notes from the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, I cover the English-language films from Britain, Australia and the U.S., which include documentaries, mainstream movies, films about sexuality and toxic chauvinism, class conflict and ennui.
During an eight-month visit to Hong Kong in 1980-81, I took out a membership in a cinema club called Studio One. I recently came across the eight monthly schedules for their screenings and discovered that my memory of the movies I’d been to see varied widely. What makes one thing stick while another fades away? Damned if I know!
The new MUBI seven-disk set of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom provides an opportunity to re-visit the original two seasons from 1994 and 1997 and finally see the elaborate blend of satire, soap opera and ghost story reach some kind of conclusion with the third season made in 2022; while it proves impossible to attain the unique energy of the original, which achieved a perfect balance between horror and comedy, The Kingdom: Exodus does tie up many of the loose ends left dangling for twenty-five years. An even stranger piece of experimental horror has been restored by Le Chat Qui Fume with their 4K edition of Leslie Stevens’ Incubus (1966) in which a pre-Kirk William Shatner confronts demons while speaking Esperanto.
Continuing my survey of what I’ve been watching this Spring… Mondo Macabro Mondo Macabro is a label I haven’t mentioned much here, though they specialize in genre movies from around the world and I’ve discovered some real oddities through them – like H. Tjut Djalil’s Mystics in Bali (1981) and Juan Lopez Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1975). […]